Algorithms Do Not Radicalize People. They Reward Emotional Consistency.

One of the most common ways we talk about social media is also one of the least accurate. We say that algorithms radicalize people. That platforms push users toward extremism. That recommendation systems drag otherwise reasonable individuals into ideological rabbit holes.

I used to believe that.

This framing is comforting because it removes human agency from the equation. It suggests that people are acted upon, rather than shaped through participation. But it is also misleading.

Algorithms do not radicalize people. They reward emotional consistency.

Social media platforms are not designed to promote truth, balance, or nuance. They are designed to maximize engagement. And engagement is not driven by careful reasoning. It is driven by emotion that is clear, repeatable, and legible to a machine.

Anger, grievance, fear, resentment, moral superiority, humiliation. These emotions perform well because they are easy to recognize, easy to trigger, and easy to sustain over time. Content that reliably produces the same emotional response is more predictable. Predictability is valuable. It keeps users scrolling.

What this means in practice is that platforms reward people who show up emotionally the same way over and over again.

If you consistently frame the world as hostile, the algorithm learns that hostility is your lane. If you consistently frame events as evidence of betrayal, decline, or threat, the system responds by showing you more content that fits that emotional pattern. Because that is what keeps you engaged.

Over time, beliefs harden not through persuasion, but through repetition. The topics change. The emotional framing stays the same. That feeling becomes familiar. Familiarity becomes comfort. Comfort becomes conviction.

This is why radicalization today rarely feels like a sharp turn. It feels like coherence. Like finally making sense of things. Like everything clicking into place.

The algorithm did not persuade you. It reflected you back to yourself.

This dynamic also explains why “both sides” debates and fact-based corrections so often fail. Facts that disrupt emotional consistency are experienced as attacks. They feel destabilizing, not enlightening. The nervous system resists them. The platform quietly deprioritizes them.

What survives instead are narratives that preserve emotional continuity. Narratives that allow the user to feel the same way about new information as they felt about the old information. Narratives that do not ask for emotional recalibration.

This is structural.

Social media trains users to perform their emotions in increasingly legible ways. The clearer and more consistent the emotional signal, the more visibility it receives. Over time, this narrows the range of acceptable feeling. Ambivalence disappears. Complexity underperforms. Rage and certainty thrive.

Propaganda does not need to convince. It only needs to align itself with an existing emotional pattern and then feed it relentlessly.

Understanding this shifts how we think about media literacy.

The problem is not that people are being dragged into extremism against their will. The problem is that they are being rewarded for emotional consistency until belief systems calcify around those emotional responses.

Real media literacy, therefore, cannot stop at identifying misinformation. It has to ask harder questions. What emotional response is being cultivated here? What feeling keeps getting reinforced? What version of the self is being rewarded?

For people who teach, lead, manage audiences, or shape public narratives, this matters. Emotional reinforcement loops affect decision-making, workplace culture, brand trust, and civic life long before they show up as ideology.

A significant part of my work focuses on helping people recognize these invisible feedback loops. Not to police emotion, but to understand how platforms quietly shape what feels normal, obvious, or inevitable.

Because the most powerful form of influence does not change what people think.

It changes what feels normal.